ABSTRACT
The Athenian envoys, in their speech to the citizens of Sparta, noted, very aptly, that protracted conflicts obey their own laws. Once a conflict becomes protracted, neither party can exercise much control over it, and the timing and manner of its termination become merely matters of chance. While a vast, and in many ways an impressive, literature has emerged in the past few years dealing with aspects of conflict causes and dynamics (for a review, see Bremer, 1993), the subject of how conflicts – protracted or otherwise – end or terminate has attracted much less scholarly attention. There are good reasons why this has been the case. Unlike other social processes, conflicts have no precise termination points (Coser, 1961). How and when conflict terminates is usually a matter decided by the adversaries. Some conflicts (e.g. feuds, duels, strikes) have built-in rules for termination; other conflicts, more costly and protracted, are exceedingly difficult to terminate. They obey no rules, and are dependent upon the potential victor and vanquished making barely recognizable contributions to determine the termination of their conflict. When we speak of conflict termination we evoke the notion of finality, specificity, closure and reciprocity – all of which may well be artificial constructs. Research on conflict termination has tended to revolve around such questions as: Do conflicts terminate at a particular point? What variables affect it, and is this point predictable (Carrol, 1969; Klinberg, 1966)? The idea that a conflict can be terminated by a discernible diplomatic or military act is intuitively appealing, but an overly narrow conception. We prefer to see conflict termination as a phase in the overall process of ending a conflict, a phase that may be
short or long, that may or may not have identifiable points in time, and requires complex decisions by the combatants and a commitment to an implementation structure (Mitchell, 1991). This is a broader conception of termination, and one that we wish to link, in a rigorous fashion, to a particular class of conflicts. Traditional conceptions of conflict termination focus on changes in the military dimension (e.g. the end of armed hostilities) to define a conflict or a war as having terminated. The military dimension distinguishes between a winner and a loser, thereby bringing a conflict to an end (Pillar, 1983). One cannot deny that stopping bloodshed is an important goal and a process worthy of scholarly inquiry (see Massoud, 1996, for a review). Nevertheless, we believe that this conception of termination is far too narrow. Although a particular conflict may end, this does not necessarily mean that violence between the parties has ended, or that the threat of renewed warfare within a few years has disappeared. Indeed, one frequent pattern in international relations is the repeated cycles of conflict and war between the same sets of states. Thus, in a longitudinal perspective one might consider the termination of a particular war as only a temporary abatement in armed hostilities rather than an instance of conflict resolution that finally removes all prospect of war. In this article we explore a broader conception of conflict termination and apply it to the context of long-standing or intractable conflicts, what we designate as ‘enduring rivalries’ in accordance with the growing research on this subject (Goertz and Diehl, 1993). We regard conflict termination not as the end of a single ongoing event (e.g. the Yom Kippur War), but rather as the termination of the process that produces war, or the threat of war. Termination is a dynamic process of management that deals with conflict interactions that lead repeatedly to war.1 Conflict termination can be achieved in two related fashions. First, the probability of conflict can be significantly reduced (preferably to zero) even if the rivalry itself cannot be ended. That is, an enduring rivalry may persist, but states learn to manage that conflict without resorting to force. Second, and more desirably from a policy standpoint, conflict termination can occur when the basic structure of the rivalry itself ends. When two states no longer wish to consider the resort to military force to solve their differences, the cycle of repeated violent conflict, and the threat of conflict, is eliminated. In this sense a conflict is truly terminated. We wish to explore both these aspects of conflict termination in our analysis. We want to study conflict termination in the context of a specific set of intractable conflicts known as enduring rivalries. As we note below, these conflicts exhibit repeated military confrontations and account for a vastly disproportionate percentage of the war and other military conflict in the international system. Such conflicts may also show the most resistance to any form of conflict management (Bercovitch and Diehl, 1997). These conflicts represent the most difficult test for any efforts at conflict termination, yet given their severity and significance, they are precisely the kind of conflicts that the international community must manage or contain. We begin with a brief empirical description of intractable conflicts and their propensity for violence. In this way we hope to demonstrate that they are a
worthy subject of analysis for conflict termination. In the following section we develop a conceptual framework for studying conflict management and termination in the context of enduring rivalries. In two more empirically based sections we review existing evidence and provide some new analyses of what methods are likely to be effective in managing and terminating intractable conflicts. We conclude by comparing conflict management of intractable conflicts with other approaches to conflict termination. This comparison will form the basis of our policy-relevant implications.
